Odinn's Child (18 page)

If our lives were pinched in the longhouse of the Greenlanders, the conditions in the two houses occupied by the Icelanders were far, far worse. Two of their men had received crippling wounds in the Skraeling attack, and while in summertime they might have been able to recover from their injuries with adequate food and warm sunshine, they failed to survive the fetid gloom of their longhouses. They lay wrapped in their lice-ridden clothes and with almost nothing to eat until they died a lingering and famished death. Theirs were not the only Icelandic deaths that winter. One of the longhouses was infected with some sort of coughing sickness which killed three of the settlers, and then a child, driven to desperation by hunger, wandered out into the black winter night and was found a few paces from the entrance next morning, frozen to death. A malignant silence settled over the three longhouses, which became no more than three long humps in the snow. For days on end nothing stirred.

Our longhouse was the most westerly of the three, and only occasionally did someone venture outside and walk through the thick snow to visit our immediate neighbours. For two months no one at all from our longhouse went as far as the second of the Icelandic houses, and when someone did — it was Thorvard, Freydis's husband - he found the door was banked up with snow as if no one had emerged for days. When he levered open the door and went inside, he found the place was a mortuary. A third of the people were dead of cold and hunger, and the survivors looked no more than bundles of rags, scarcely able to raise themselves from where they lay on the side benches.

There was more bad news when one of our own men came back from the beach, where we had stored the two knorrs for the winter. At the time of the first, unexpected snow we had dragged the two vessels on rollers up above the high-tide line, propped them up on wooden baulks, and heaped banks of shingle around them as a protection from the blizzards. Then we covered them with tents of wadmal. But a winter gale had stripped away the covers from the elderly vessel that Leif had loaned us, and snow had filled her. A false spring day with its sudden thaw had melted the snow to water, which filled the bilge. That same evening a sudden drop in temperature turned the water into ice, which expanded and split the garboard plank, the key plank which ran the length of her keel. When our carpenter tried to mend the long and dangerous crack he found that the bottom of our ship was entirely rotten. Every time he tried to replace a section of plank, the adjacent area of hull crumbled away. The carpenter was a grouchy and bad-tempered man at the best of times, and now he reported to Thorvard that he refused to waste his time trying to make the decayed old vessel seaworthy.

By that stage, I think, Freydis had already made up her mind that the colony was a failure and that we would have to evacuate Leif s cabins yet again. But she kept the idea to herself and, with typical guile, prepared for the evacuation without alerting anyone else. Her immediate problem was the damage to our knorr. We needed a vessel to carry us away from Vinland and our ancient and rickety knorr was no longer seaworthy. One possible solution was for all the settlers, both Icelanders and Greenlanders, to evacuate the colony by cramming aboard the Icelanders' large, newer vessel. But given the history of bad blood between the two groups it was very unlikely that the Icelanders would agree to this arrangement. Alternatively the Icelanders might lend us their vessel for the evacuation if we promised to send the ship back to them once we had safely arrived in Greenland. Though why the Icelanders should trust us to do this was an open question. And even if the Icelanders were so generous, Freydis knew that there was a more acute problem to confront: if the Icelanders stayed behind in Vinland and somehow managed to make a success of the venture, then by customary law the possession and ownership of the entire settlement would pass away from the Erikssons and transfer to Helgi and Finnbogi and their heirs. They would no longer be Leif s cabins, but Helgi and Finnbogi's cabins, and this was a humiliation which Freydis, the daughter of Erik the Red, could not bear.

Her solution to the dilemma was as artful as it was demonic. It depended on that fatal Norse belief in personal honour.

Very soon after the spring thaw, a real one this time, she walked over to visit the nearest Icelandic longhouse. It was early in the morning, at first light, and I saw her go because I had slipped out of the longhouse to get some badly needed fresh air after a fetid night spent among the snoring Greenlanders. I was loitering near one of the empty store sheds. I always tried to stay well clear of Freydis, so when I saw her I stepped behind the shed until she walked past. I watched her push open the door of the Icelanders' longhouse and go inside. When she reappeared she was accompanied by Finnbogi, who was wearing a heavy coat to keep out the cold. The two were intending to walk in my direction, and once again I shrank back from view. They halted, less than ten paces away, and I heard Freydis say, 'I've had enough of Vinland. I've made up my mind that my people should leave the colony and return home. For that I need to buy your knorr because our vessel is no longer fit for the journey to Greenland. We'll sail away from here, and if you, Helgi and your people want to stay on, then the settlement is yours.'

Finnbogi must have been taken by surprise, for there was a long pause and then he answered that he had no objection to her proposal but would first have to check it with his brother. I heard the soft crunch of his footsteps receding on the slushy snow as he returned to the Icelanders' house. I waited to give Freydis time to get back to our own longhouse, and then scuttled there as fast as I could, knowing instinctively that something was very wrong. It was not my second sight which warned me. It was my long experience of Freydis. Speaking to Finnbogi, her voice had carried that hint of treachery and manipulation that had preceded the unpleasant tricks she had inflicted on me back in Brattahlid in my father's house. That tone of deceit convinced me that Freydis was planning something unpleasant. Quite how foul her plan was soon became apparent.

I got into the longhouse just in time to hear Freydis deliberately provoke her weak-willed husband Thorvard into losing his temper. That was another of Freydis's techniques I recognised. Thorvard must still have been in bed when Freydis returned to the longhouse and climbed in beside him, for he kept repeating his question. 'Where have you been? Where have you been? You have got cold, wet feet, and the hem of your shift is damp, so you must have been outside.' At first Freydis refused to answer. Then finally, when Thorvard was truly irritated with her grudging silence, she said that she had been to see Finnbogi and his brother to ask them for the sale or loan of their knorr.

'They refused my request outright,' she said. 'They laughed in my face, and then insulted me. They said I was becoming more like a man every day, and that you, not I, should have come to discuss the matter with them. Finnbogi even went so far as to hit me, knocking me to the ground.'

Thorvard began to bluster. He had a good mind to go out and give the brothers a good thrashing, he said. Freydis pounced on his bravado. 'If you were more than half a man,' she retorted scathingly, 'you would do more than just lie in bed threatening the two ruffians who have humiliated me. A real man would go off and avenge my honour. But you, you little worm, you are such a coward that you will do nothing. I know you and your fainthearted ways, and so too do half the people in Brattahlid. When we get home, I'm going to divorce you on the grounds of cowardice, and there's no one who would not sympathise with me.'

As usual, my aunt knew how to twist the knife. Cowardice is almost the worst and most shameful ground for summary divorce in Norse society, exceeded only by homosexual acts. Her goading was more than Thorvard could bear. He leapt out of bed, threw on his clothes and grabbed an axe and a sword. Moments later, with Freydis at his heels and calling on the other Greenlanders to follow their leader, Thorvard was slipping and slithering along the muddy path to the Icelanders' longhouse. He slammed his way into the building, ran across to where Helgi was sitting on his bed, sleepily thinking over Freydis's proposal to buy the knorr, and with a great swipe he sank his axe into Helgi's chest, killing him. Within moments a massacre was in progress. More and more of the Greenlanders appeared, brandishing their weapons and hacking and stabbing at the unfortunate Icelanders, who were taken by surprise. There were curses and shouts as the Icelanders rolled off their sleeping benches and scrabbled to find their weapons and defend themselves. But they were at too much of a disadvantage. Most of them were killed while they were sleepy or unarmed.

Too young to have been called upon to join the attack on the Icelanders, I heard the shrieks and clamour of the massacre and ran to the side entrance of the Icelanders' longhouse, arriving on the scene just in time to see Freydis pick up Helgi's sword from under his bed and make sure that his brother Finnbogi did not have a chance to reveal the truth by running him through so powerfully that the blade emerged a hand's breadth out of his back. She then wrenched the blade clear and joined in the general bloodbath.

Again Norse custom had its malign influence. Once the massacre had started, there was no going back. Every man knew the pitiless truth. The moment that the first mortal blow had been struck, it was better to kill every last Icelander. Any survivor was a potential witness, and his or her evidence about the murders would lead to a cycle of revenge if a report of the atrocity reached their families back in Iceland. Contributing to this stark policy was the killing frenzy which now gripped the Greenlanders. They killed and killed and killed until they were tired. Only when every adult Icelander, male or female, was dead did they stop the slaughter. By then only five Icelanders were left alive, three boys and two girls, and they were huddled in a corner, wide-eyed and speechless with shock as they watched their parents cut down. Murdering the children was beyond the capacity of even the most blood-crazed Greenlander, but not Freydis. She ordered the men to complete the job. They looked back at her, panting with exhaustion, their swords and axes streaked with gore, their clothes spattered with blood, and the red madness slowly fading from their eyes. They looked drained and tired, and did not move. Freydis raised her borrowed sword, and screamed at them. 'Kill the brats! Kill them! Do as I say!'

I was well inside the longhouse. Appalled by the sight of what seemed like so many limp and blood-soaked bundles of clothing lying on the floor, I crept along the side wall and sank down into a corner, wishing that I was somewhere else. I sat with my back to the wall, trying to make myself invisible, with my arms around my knees and my head down. Hearing Freydis's harridan shriek I raised my head and saw her become grim and calm. Her sway over the men became almost diabolic. She seemed to dominate them like some awful creature from the Hel of the Gods, as she ordered the men to bring the children one by one before her. Such was her authority that the men obeyed, and they led the children to stand in front of her. Then, teeth clenched, she beheaded each child.

I vomited pale, acid bile.

F
REYDIS NOW ORDERED
that everything that would burn was to be collected and heaped around the bases of the heavy timber posts supporting the turf roofs of the longhouses. Wooden benches, scraps of timber, old rags, anything combustible was piled up. Then Freydis herself went down the line of pillars, setting fire to the materials. She was the last person to leave each building and heave the big door shut. By midday we could see that smoke, which had been issuing from the smoke hole, was also seeping out from the sides of the building, where the turf wall joined the roof.

The whole structure of the longhouse began to look like a smouldering charcoal burners' mound as the turf and wattle interior walls eventually caught fire. The heat steadily built up until we could feel it from forty paces away. Around the fire the last of the snow melted and turned to slush, and in the end the long curved roofs simply fell in with a soft thump, a few sparks curled up into the sky, and the remains of the longhouses which the Icelanders had spent three months building became their funeral pyres. Looking at the ruins, it was obvious to us that in a few winters there would be scarcely any trace that they had ever existed.

Freydis summoned us to a meeting in our own longhouse late that evening. We gathered in a glum silence. Many of us were ridden with guilt, a few were trying to boost their spirits by bragging that it was exactly what the Icelanders had deserved. But Freydis was clear-headed and unmoved. 'The only trace of the Icelanders' existence now lies in our heads,' she told us fiercely. 'No one else will know what has happened, if we keep our mouths shut about the events of this day. We, who are responsible, are the only witnesses. Here on the edge of the world there is no one else to observe and report. We control the only knowledge of what has happened.' Freydis promised us that we had been justified in destroying the Icelanders. Again she produced the lie that she had asked Finnbogi for the loan of the knorr and been refused. 'The Icelanders denied us their knorr,' she said. 'If we had not seized the initiative, they would have sailed away, leaving us behind to our deaths. We acted in self-defence by striking first. What we have done was to save our own lives.'

I do not know how many of us believed her, perhaps a few. Those who did not were either too ashamed or too shocked or frightened of what might happen if they disagreed to speak out. So we kept quiet and followed Freydis's orders when she told us to load the knorr with our possessions and a cargo of valuable Vinland timber to take back to Greenland, for even at that late stage Freydis was determined to make a profit from her venture.

We were so keen to get away from that sinister place that we had the boat loaded and ready to sail within a week. Then Freydis ordered that our longhouse, too, should be set on fire. She told us that when we returned to Greenland we were to say that we had decided to abandon the colony, but the Icelanders had elected to stay, that Freydis and Thorvard had purchased the knorr, and when last seen the Icelanders had been thriving and prosperous and alive. Should anyone in later years visit the site, all they would find would be the burnt-out ruins of the longhouses, and of course they would presume that the Skraelings had overwhelmed the settlement and destroyed every last colonist.